The monuments of world

Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th–9th Century)
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 14–July 8, 2012
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Helen C. Evans, with Brandie Ratliff
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 332 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press)                                                  

Vladimir Trebenin/State Hermitage Museum

A silver plate from Constantinople depicting two companions of Dionysos, Silenus and a Maenad, 613–630. Images from classical mythology persisted in Byzantine art well into the Christian era, and in Middle Eastern art long after the Islamic conquest.

In the century between 630 and 730 a considerable portion of the Old World took on its modern face. Through a series of astonishing campaigns, Arab Muslim armies created a single empire that, for a time, would reach from southern Spain to northern India and the western borders of China. From the “big bang” of these conquests a new galaxy emerged. From then onward, a closely interconnected chain of Muslim regions (one part of which, from modern Morocco to the borders of Iran, came to speak Arabic) stretched across Africa and Eurasia, joining the Atlantic to western China. A new civilization came into being, one that has lasted, with many permutations, into our own days. In the words of Finbarr Flood, a major contributor to the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum’s somewhat modestly titled exhibition “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th–9th Century),” the foundation of the Arab empire was “one of the most remarkable achievements in human history.”

The exhibition takes us to the heart of this great detonation. It embraces the last century of the pre-Islamic Middle East and the first two centuries of Islam. To our surprise, we do not find ourselves in a world swept by a mighty wind. Instead, we enter a series of quiet rooms where time seems to stand still. Like a perfect late fall day, only the occasional rustle of a falling leaf startles us into realizing that the seasons are about to change. The few clear signs that Islam had, indeed, become politically dominant in the Middle East by the end of the seventh century strike us with almost ominous intensity. For there are so few of them.

In the room dedicated to commerce, we suddenly find silver coins that are like all their predecessors, except that they now bear a new religious message in a new, Arabic script. In the room before it, we notice the discreet censoring of the representation of a living creature on the floor of a Christian church, out of respect for Muslim attitudes toward art. In the last room, we come on pages of the Koran that look as ornate and magnificent as any Christian gospels of their time. They are covered with a Kufic script, whose bold, foursquare lines have an ancient grandeur, strangely unlike the fluid scripts that we now associate with medieval and modern Arabic.

In all these cases, we are brought up short by hints of purposive change in a world that, to all appearances, had not changed. Even with Islam present in it, we are looking back into a world before our own, still caught in the grip of antiquity, with its back still turned on the grand future of Islam in medieval and modern times. In retrospect, the first centuries of Islamic rule associated with the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) seem much closer to the ancient world and more open to non-Islamic influences than was the Islamic civilization that would emerge in later centuries.

This exhibition—along with the groundbreaking scholarship that has gone into its catalog—has banished the melodramatic tone with which the rise of Islam has usually been presented in standard accounts of the period. We can now say with confidence that the Arab armies did not leave a trail of desolation across the Middle East. Local populations did not sink into poverty. Far from retreating into the status of timorous minorities, vigorous Christian and Jewish communities continued to maintain their own traditions largely unmolested.

Most surprising of all, we can now suggest that the spread of Islam did not happen overnight. It was not imposed by force on the conquered peoples. Although their position as the rulers of a successful empire doubtless weighed heavily in their favor, Muslims talked their way into the Middle East quite as much as they fought their way across it. The words of Anna Ballian, author of one of the catalog essays, describing the relations between the Caliph Hisham (724–743) and the Christians at the great shrine of Saint Sergios at Rusafa in Syria, catch this strange mixture of curiosity and assertiveness. A Muslim such as Hisham (like many less powerful believers) could think of himself as

an undisputed ruler but by no means a foreign interloper, imposing himself by force…rather [as] a fellow traveler who shares the same heritage.

Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine, Sinai, Egypt

A bird-shaped copper vessel with an Arabic inscription reading ‘In the name of God the blessing of God to the owner,’ Syria or Iraq, early ninth century

Muslims were not always welcome as fellow travelers. They could be pushy and proud. But they did not stifle debate. Their enterprise in what has been called “competitive self-definition” ensured that they remained in constant dialogue with those around them. As a result, Islamic civilization in its first centuries owed much of its richness to continued religious conversations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. These conversations slowly changed the religious texture of the Middle East to the advantage of Islam. But until the year 1000, at least, it was the Muslims, and not the Jews and Christians, who were the minority religion. What we are looking at is not the Islam of the modern imagination. It is a very new Islam that was still trying to find a place for itself in a very old world.

Altogether, the Met exhibition offers the thrill of looking at the very first stages of a new world in the making. This new world did not emerge as a result of dramatic ruptures. Rather, it occurred, silently and all the more irrevocably, like a genetic mutation, through the accumulation of small changes in an ancient continuum.

To make one’s way through the exhibition, the catalog—edited by Helen Evans with the assistance of Brandie Ratliff—is more than usually helpful. There are two reasons for this—one bad and one very good.

Let us take the bad reason first. Loans of objects from Russia and Egypt that had been promised to the exhibition were canceled. But these objects are carefully described and commented upon in the catalog. This goes a long way to redress whatever imbalances their absence has created in the overall flow of a magnificently conceived exhibition. I would recommend particularly that readers linger over the discussion of the early Christian icons and of the Christian Arabic manuscripts preserved in the monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai. For here we can listen to a Christianity of the Middle East that resolutely combined engagement with the Islamic present and loyalty to its own past. They show that Christianity found its own voice in the Arabic language, so as to contribute to the exuberant new Arabic culture. At the same time, Christians were still bound by their past. They continued to wrestle as they had for centuries under the Byzantine Empire—through the poignant art of icons quite as much as through formal writings—with the mighty paradox of a joining of God and man, a theme to which Jews and Muslims remained pointedly indifferent.

Castello Sforzesco, Milan

An ivory carving from the ‘Grado Chair’ showing Saint Mark preaching, eastern Mediterranean or Egypt, seventh–eighth century

But the good reason could not be better. This catalog is an outstanding introduction to the transition from late antiquity to Islam. It presents the views of a new generation of scholars, who have brought significant changes of perspective to our understanding of the period as a whole. Their alert scholarship ranges widely. We have masterly essays by Finbarr Flood, on what was truly new about the art of the early Islamic world and on the production of the first Korans. We can also appreciate the novel application of radiocarbon datings (by Gudrun Bühl, Cäcilia Fluck, and others) to textiles and ivories. These redatings, made while assembling the exhibition, show, for instance, that in Egypt a classical tradition of ivory carving continued to flourish for centuries after the Arab conquest—witness the extraordinary set of ivories associated with the “Grado Chair,” which are usually tucked away in the far reaches of the Castello Sforzesco of Milan. Such expert discoveries prove that the populations of the Middle East, Christian and Jewish quite as much as Muslim, moved to rhythms that Western historians (hypnotized by the notion of the rise of Islam as marking a radical break in the history of the region) had not dreamed of until recently.

With the catalog in hand, let us visit this world. First, it is a world whose center of gravity shifted significantly toward the south. In the year 600, thirty-two years before the death of Muhammad, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and the fringes of Arabia were ruled from a considerable distance by the two great empires of the time—Byzantium and Sasanian Iran. They had languages of their own—especially Syriac and Coptic (the last version of the language of the Pharaohs). Greek was still widespread in the southern provinces of Byzantium. It could still delight (or afflict) students in unexpected places. For instance, around 600 AD, a young monk attempted to learn Greek by copying out onto a potsherd a series of maxims derived from the Greek comic writer Menander. He did this in the monastery of Epiphanios, which looked out over the ruins of ancient Luxor.

The economic heart of this region lay in Mesopotamia, to the east, and in the vast territory of Egypt, to the south. Beyond Egypt lay a yet deeper south. At the southern end of the Red Sea, Axum and what would become the Christian empire of Ethiopia faced the miraculous green of Yemen, an ancient south Arabian civilization where Christian and Jewish kingdoms fought to gain the upper hand throughout the sixth century. When the Arabs of the time of Muhammad spoke with admiration of a “great church,” it was not the far distant Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. It was the Great Church of Sana’a, built by an Ethiopian governor, with its golden mosaics covered with jewel-like images of trees.

For the inhabitants of these southern lands, the Arab conquests were not an explosion. They were an implosion. The two great empires collapsed at a touch, leaving the Middle East as a single zone, no longer divided by the military frontier between Byzantium and Sasanian Iran. For the first time since the days of Xerxes and Alexander the Great, it was possible to travel directly, within a single empire, from Alexandria to the foot of the Zagros Mountains in Iran and beyond. We can see this happen in the mosaics and products provided to the exhibition from Jordan. Regions that had lain on the dead end of a frontier now became thoroughfares. Synagogues and churches adjusted rapidly to the development of what Steven Fine calls a “new umbrella civilization.” The pottery kilns of Jerash in present-day Jordan (ancient Gerasa—a city already three millennia old by this time) briskly turned out new lamps, with a Christian inscription on one side and an Arabic, Muslim invocation on the other.

Qasr al-Mshatta, Jordan

A limestone fragment carved with a vine scroll and a vase, Qasr al-Mshatta, Jordan, mid-eighth century

Up to the eighth century, mosaics continued to be placed in churches that contained images of the ancient cities of their region. Each city was shown, in a classical Roman manner, with colonnades, elaborate roofscapes, and ancient triumphal gates. Each was distinguished by its best-known monuments. Like images of the skyscrapers of New York, these little vignettes summed up an ideal of what a city should be. They reassured those who stepped on them that life had not changed.